The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine goes beyond search by looking at the invisible links between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online momentum for any given event.
The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases, says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
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Secret information isnt always the brass ring in our profession, then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. In fact, theres a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.
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Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollahs long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallahs past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres accusations.
Thats one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But its safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agencys attention. In-Q-Tel doesnt make investments in firms without an end customer ready to test out that companys products.
Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts werent disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Googles investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.
